Manage your subscription

Melting glaciers bring 1980s pollution revival

14 October 2009

BAD hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the eighties that we’d rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers are generating a revival of toxic organic pollutants.

Christian Bogdal and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich studied levels of pollution in sediment at the bottom of the Oberaar lake in Bern, Switzerland. They found that banned chemicals, such as pesticides that have been linked with Parkinson’s disease, have been pouring into the lake at an increasing rate since the 1990s (Environmental …